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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Teaching: Ain't No Fleas on Me

There’s an old adage that, “if you lie down with dogs,
you get up with fleas.” Your Dad probably used it, or something like it, when
he caught you hanging out with the so-called wrong crowd. Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Dad probably used the line on him and Nietzsche prettied it into “When you
stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”

In 33 days I’ll watch a class of high school seniors
claim their diplomas and head out into whatever awaits them. At least one of
these guys is going to M.I.T. Another is headed to my alma mater, Wheaton
College in Massachusetts. One young woman is headed to Tufts; another is bound
for the Marines.

More than a few will be grabbing their diplomas and
running as far away from organized education as they can get. Some will come
back, others will tell anyone who asks that they hated school and all it made
them do.

Most of these students don’t get enough sleep at night.
They spend too much time on Facebook or playing video games. Few of them read
for fun. Some of them play guitar. They’re selfish, ignorant jerks. Many of
them have never changed a tire or washed a dish. A couple of them have saved
lives. They’re lazy. They build houses for the less fortunate. More than a few
drink and smoke pot. A bunch of them have had sex. One girl started an origami
club. Several score think deep thoughts and worry about the future. A small
percentage is half convinced world will really end in 2012. I’d say half of
them are convinced life is worth living and the other half are still waiting to
see. Maybe 1 out of 50 can name all nine Supreme Court justices.

They’re enlightened angels. They can’t spell. Two of
them got together to start a poetry blog. A few of them have thought about
killing themselves; some of them have tried. Some want to change the world;
many have let the world change them. They’ve never lived without the Internet
and can’t separate themselves from their cell phones. A lot of them have no
grasp of the “Protestant work ethic”; they let Mommy and Daddy pave the way for
them. One of them dropped by the other day to show me a Shakespearean sonnet
he’d spent weeks working on. One guy has set up a nonprofit to make sure people
in Third-World countries get fresh water. Some of them believe in God and want
to spread the word. Others don’t believe in anything and don’t give a fuck who
knows.

This is my abyss; these are my dogs. I’ve spent the last
five years with adolescents crawling through my brain, impressing me,
disappointing me, testing me, teaching me, bugging the hell out of me and
leaving me stunned.

And I am a better man, a better person, for it. I spend
every work day with them, a slowly calcifying stone in the company of clouds of
pure, untapped potential, spinning storms of Could-Be. They could be parents.
They could be doctors. They could be criminals. They could be heroes. They
could be the generation that gets it right. They could be the last generation
that had a chance of pulling us back. They could be the generation that blows
it.

Work with them. Learn from them. Be open to them. Engage
them and offer them your best. Make friends with them and help them see their
worth.

Odds are, they’ll turn out just like us. But maybe
they’ll shake off the fleas they caught in our company, and be better.

1 comment:

A beautiful portrait of my generation, both enlightening and depressing... I have no doubt that some of our generation will, through social, political, and intellectual ignorance screw us over even more. But there are the few who offer a ray of hope, although you're right; none of us can bloody spell. Let me say this: we cannot shake off the fleas on our own. But with teachers who both respect and challenge us into new forms of thinking and personal experience (or perhaps re-awaken the parts of our brains responsible for independent and critical thinking that, over time, have atrophied to nearly nothing), there is a chance. Keep giving us the tools to build the flea-collars and we just might make it.